‘Oh yes.’
‘And Lady Monson?’
He looked down upon his hands without answering.
‘I am a single man,’ said I, ‘and am, therefore, no doubt disqualified from passing an opinion. But I vow to heaven, Wilfrid, if my wife chose to leave me for another man, I would not lift a finger either to regain her or to avenge myself. A divorce would fully appease me. Who would not feel gay to be rid of a woman whose every heart-throb is a dishonour? What more unendurable than an association rendered an incomparable insult, and the basest lie under heaven, by one’s wife’s secret abhorrence and her desire for another?’
On a sudden he sprang to his feet as though stabbed. ‘Cease, for Christ’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘The more truthful your words are, the more they madden me. If I could tear her from me,’ clutching at his breast in a wild, tragical way—‘if I could cleanse my heart of her as you would purify a vessel of what has lain foul and poisonous in it; if disgust would but fall cool on my resentment and leave me loathing her merely; if—if—if! But it is if that makes the difference betwixt hell and heaven in this bad world of unexpected things.’ He sat afresh, passing the back of his hand over his brow, and sighing heavily. ‘There is no if for me,’ said he. ‘I love her passionately yet, and so hate her besides that——’ He checked himself with a shake of the head. ‘No, no, perhaps not when it came to it,’ he muttered as though thinking aloud. ‘We are wasting time,’ he cried, pulling out his watch. ‘Charlie, you will accompany me?’
‘But you say you start the day after to-morrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘From Southampton?’
‘Yes.’
‘And, should you find the “Shark” gone when you arrive at the Cape——’